Combier Arnaud

Landing the TGV difficult not to spot the long silhouette of Arnaud Combier Cap screwed on the head, it is that it is still beautiful in the Mâconnais at the end of September. It was to spend two days in this superb Burgundy that I left Paris at dawn, it is mainly to take the time to discover Arnaud's work and talk about his projects.

It is not 10 hours but already crisscrossing the roads that lead us in Beaujolais I know that these 48 hours will be exciting. This is the full period of vinification. And when we make plain wine it is the moment when the quality of the juices reveals the months spent in the vineyard. Before even entering the vintage, we surprise laughter and a good big sound which rises from an enclosure posed not far from an elevator. Quentin crowds the pretty clusters from Gamay in music. Arnaud lifts the cover of a tank, it is a question of listening to the fermenting juices. I believe that I prefer this score there ... It has been more than 20 years since Arnaud developed nature cuvées in Burgundy. Natural wine is its identity. If genealogy is the list of family members, then we can talk about the legendary family of Lapierre, Foillard and Valette. Winegrowers with whom he shared founding exchanges a long time ago. At the time if his Cuvées de Saint-Véran were already in organic, he continued the path to nature by taking out his first cuvées "without sulfur".

Your relationship to plain wine?

I started to make natural wines 20 years ago, the idea at the time was to offer better wines than classic, more digestible, more personal wines too. To do this, you have to be very meticulous during all the stages of manufacturing, very precise, therefore far from the “a natural wine is done all by itself”, know-how rather than letting it do.

Why a trading activity?

I want to offer natural wines at affordable prices and it is by accompanying my partners that this is possible. In addition, this activity allows me to have fun producing more original wines, orange wine type, to build cuvées with some of my clients, something difficult to achieve when you are a winemaker.

How is the selection of grapes and grapes going and what is the partnership with the winemaker?

It is the link with the winemaker, the ability to understand us and possibly the friendship that can be created that decides on the selection. Chardonnay, Gamay and Pinot Noir, tomorrow Aligoté, I am essentially quite Burgundian. The idea is to work in the long term with the same winegrowers, to develop our different techniques and therefore advance the different cuvées produced. My field of action will therefore depend on the need for the winemaker, either wine (organic conversion, use of equipment, soil life) or oenological (work without sulfur, assembly, preparation of wines with bottles).

How is the production of wine going?

There is no recipe, we adapt to the configuration of the different types of rags where wines are raised. In broad outline: organic or conversion grapes, no input during the vinif (neither sulfur neither yeasts, nor stuff, no machines ...) except accident, soft music, and according to the stability of the wine before the Bottling we add sulfur or not (the idea is to be less than 30mg of SO2, a limit dose for plain wines).

What type of wine do you want to do?

Fine and intelligent wines like me (laughs), if they have fruit and freshness is good too.